Why, hello there, Google+

Thanks, Nico for the invite. Now exploring: the new Google+. Hmm, looks familiar... LOL.

From Mashable: Waving Goodbye to 2009

The Year in Review Captured On a Google Wave [VIDEO]

From the same folks at Whirled Interactive who brought us the excellently funny “Pulp Wave Fiction” comes another intelligent use of Google Wave as a video production medium — this time it’s used to encapsulate the year in news and social media.

In “Waving Goodbye to 2009,” embedded after the break, we see a Google Wave rendition of the year’s most memorable moments. From the Obama inauguration to the Iran elections, from Susan Boyle to Kanye West, the video highlights the best — and worst — moments of 2009.

Check it out below and let us know what you think. Were any huge stories omitted you would have liked to see included (were we blind or did we miss an appearance from Balloon Boy, e.g.)? You can also check out some other novel use cases for Google Wave, too.

From Mashable: What Users Like/Dislike About Google Wave

An article from Mashable about Google Wave:

Google has been actively collecting feedback on Google Wave with an ongoing survey, which was distributed via email, the help center, and Twitter. Today they’ve published the initial findings for public dissection.

So far results indicate that users love the concept of Wave, appreciate the collobartion features, and like the extensions, gadgets, and robots. On the flip side, however, the most perplexing part of the Wave experience is that users’ friends and contacts don’t have access to Wave. Respondents also complained of speed issues and indicated a desire for integration with more tools like email.

Based on our experience with Google Wave, the results that Google has published are spot on and point to some of the reasons why the system is both a game changer and, on the other hand, still not ready for mainstream attention.

Google does say that they will be acting on your feedback and opinions:“With these responses and other data, we’re organizing our team around the core issues that are important to making waving better. We’re working hard to scale our systems so you can invite your friends and colleagues to wave with you. We’re also thinking about how to integrate with existing communication and collaboration tools. And since we all know that fast is better than slow, a large portion of the team is working to make Google Wave faster."

From Mashable: How Google Wave is Changing the News

• November 22nd, 2009 | by Leah Betancourt40 Comments and 1354 Reactions

  198Share

  It’s not too often that legacy media learns a new mass communication tool along with its audience. But that’s exactly what’s going on now because of Google Wave. Although it’s still invitation only and in preview, the real-time wiki collaboration platform is being used by some media companies for community building, real-time discussion, crowdsourcing, collaboration both inside and outside the newsroom, and for cross publishing content.

  Google Wave may seem familiar to older users of the Internet, who have been using the parts that make up the whole of the platform for years. Wave, however, brings those pieces together cohesively to allow users to share photos, embed videos, and converge other Google applications such asGoogle Maps and Google Calendar to create customized blocks of user-editable content on the fly. Here are four ways that newsrooms are using Wave.

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  Using Waves to Foster Engagement

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  Using Google Wave allows newsrooms to reach out to their audiences and invite their active participation on news stories. In the process, waves become a vehicle to create an engaged local community who can also play a role in the newsroom. That may redefine how news is gathered, reported and presented to its audience, blurring the boundary between newsroom and community bulletin board.

  Chicago Tribune’s RedEye blog started its first public wave on November 10, and since then it has attracted more than 300 blips. Following that success, Stephanie Yiu, RedEye’s web editor, and Scott Kleinberg, senior editor of digital and print, now lead a half-hour public wave session every day.

  “It’s a lot more live than Twitter because it’s like you can see people typing and everybody gets to know each other,” she told me. “It’s really about connecting with our readers on a new platform. We’re learning with our readers and moving forward together.”

  RedEye sends out tweets promoting each wave with a link asking Twitter followers (those that have access to Google Wave) to join the conversation. Yiu told me the daily wave is a discussion about RedEye’s cover story. During the last 10 minutes they ask participants for suggestions on how to make the wave better.

  What makes Google Wave so useful is the community building aspect, according to Yiu. “The great thing is once it ends at 11 o’clock, it keeps on going. They keep on talking,” she said. Yiu is hoping it will be a cool way to get feedback, such as movie reviews, from their readers that that they can also run in the RedEye print product, which is something they’re already doing with Twitter.

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  Using Waves As ‘Town Squares’

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  Robert Quigley, social media editor at the Austin American-Statesman, has started two public waves so far. “People are enthusiastic and they want to talk about news. I was surprised how much discussion there was about the news,” he said.

  However, said Quigley, the challenge right now is keeping public waves on topic. If they get more than 50 blips discussion grinds to a halt, reported Quigley. He added that in order for Google Wave to work during a news event, there needs to be the ability to moderate and or easily spin something into another wave and link to it in the first wave to keep it on topic. He stressed Google Wave is in its early stages and in preview, but there’s definitely potential with it, so these are issues that could be addressed in the future.

  “We’ve been looking for years for collaboration with the public in a meaningful way and this could be the tool,” he said.

  Quigley is eager to keep pushing the envelope with Google Wave to see what it possible. He told me, for example, that he wants to try a participant’s suggestion to embed a Google Calendar with links to waves listed within it so users can follow that calendar with the wave schedule. He also hopes to try the map gadget the next time Austin gets hit with an ice storm. He said he would embed a map into a Google Wave and then people could report conditions at their house. Users could edit the map as weather conditions change.

  Google Wave has the potential to become a virtual “town square,” where otherwise separate gadgets applied to content created by journalists and enhanced by the wave’s users can be used to provide an accurate, detailed description of what’s happening locally.

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  Wave as a Newsroom Content Planning Tool

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  Chris Taylor, online editor at TBO.com, is also the online breaking news editor in charge of planning content for his converged newsroom (which includes the Tampa Tribune, WFLA-TV and TBO.com). Each night he emails a content budget to the deadline team, but he is now also using a daily wave that others in the newsroom can add to, edit, etc. Taylor said there are about 15 people on this wave and he has requested more invites from Google to get more people involved.

  The daily wave accounts for all the content the newsroom knows is coming or is chasing down. There are about 40 stories in a wave and each story gets a paragraph and after each story is a blip. “Anything we can do in a newsroom of this size [to help] the content we produce to keep from falling through the cracks is a plus,” Taylor said.

  When Taylor comes into work in the morning he can immediately get caught up on the status of all items in the newsroom budget by checking the wave. He said reviewing the wave at his desk takes one-tenth the time of having meetings.

  “I think using it for this will get people comfortable with wave, which is my ultimate goal,” he said. “As we get more comfortable with it, we’ll be able to be where our audience is.”

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  Turning Blog Posts Into Public Waves

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  Andrew Nystrom, senior producer of social media and emerging platforms at the Los Angeles Times, collaborated with social media reporter Mark Milian on the blog post “How Google Wave Could Transform Journalism” that ran on the newspaper’s web site a couple of months ago.

  Among some of the ideas listed in the post were: collaborative reporting, smarter story updates, live editing, discussing while reading, and a transparent writing process. Nystrom said in an email interview they’re looking at all the potential uses that Milian posited in the blog post. In a case of “eating his own dogfood,” so to speak, Milian even embedded the post as a wave and it has since received more than 350 blips.

  “That experiment was definitely an eye-opener. My understanding of Wave has always been that it’s a valuable tool for small-team collaboration. So to see it succeed as a larger-scale crowdsourcing tool was unexpected to say the least,” Nystrom said by email. “People quickly swarmed the wave and provided a ton of really smart insights. Things we had never thought of.”

  He added that they’ll definitely do more of this and that it’s just a matter of identifying which topics would benefit from collaboration.

  “Ideally, every post would plug into wave because I love the inline commenting system. But I don’t want to flood the ocean,” according to Milian. “When we do another piece on Google Wave, or on something that begs for crowdsourcing, you will definitely see it in Wave.”

Google Wave: the calm before the storm

It seems to be quiet on the Web about Google Wave after it's announcement at Google I/O 2009. But the developer community is all a-buzz and busy testing the alpha release out, as Google prepares for its official release later this year.

Here are some links to more information about Google Wave from those who have test accounts and are trying it out:

1. The Google Wave highlight reel: The full 80-minute demo during the conference is a must-see, but if you don't have the time, watch these chosen clips on the highlights.
2. Google Wave questions and answers: This is a Twitter Q&A session from someone not from Google, trying out Wave for the first time. Nice insights. The biggest fear about using Wave is how people could see all your typos as you enter text.
3. Google Wave: Our First-hand Impressions: ReadWriteWeb gives Google Wave a spin and describes their first-hand experience with it.
4. Testing Google Wave: This Thing is Tidal: Mashable's Ben Parr continues to dig into Google Wave and comes out with a very fair and encouraging assessment.
5. Trying out Google Wave (videos): This is a work-in-progress blog post with videos (which I admit I still have to watch) on developers trying it out. They also briefly talk about how since Google Wave is an all-in-one tool for anything, ambiguity about the purpose of communicating with someone could pose as a problem.

6. 1 Wave Sandbox, 5 Hours, 17 Awesome Demos: An account post-demo of Google Wave on the Friday after I/O, about 60 developers assembled down at Google HQ for the very first Google Wave API hackathon.
7. 6 Reasons Why Google Wave Will Change PLM Collaboration: PLM is Product Lifecycle Management (as I discovered in Wikipedia). This is a jargon-filled article that talks about how product development can become faster using Google Wave because of better collaboration.
8. Google Wave will change the world: I included this article because the author and I have very similar sentiments (and his name also has Lawrence). Though I recognize that the revolution could take years to happen (much like how email started), it will happen.
9. Request for Google Wave preview access: Here's Google's link for those who want IN at the soonest possible time. Let's sign-up!

Google Wave: Six Game-Changing Features (From Mashable)

Mashable, has been a great resource for me to know what's new in the online and tech world. They seem to be the quickest to come out with new topic articles with a lot of substance.

In this article from Mashable, they pick-out some of the most promising features of Google Wave and explain why they predict it will change the game online:

1. Wiki-style functionality
The feature: While Google Wave works a lot like email or IM, there is a huge difference: you can edit not only your messages, but the messages of anybody within your wave. You can reply to messages within a conversation string and reorganize conversations.

Why it’s game-changing: There was a perfect example of how this changes communication during Google’s demo of the product. A group of people are trying to plan a group dinner, and want to see who can come or not. In email, you have a string of emails with yes or no, which can get messy.

In Wave, you can edit the original message with a section with who can or cannot go. Replies can be made within a conversation string, rather than at the end, making conversations a great deal easier to track.

2. Wave Extensions
The feature: Wave extensions are 3rd-party improvements or applications within Google Wave. There are two types: gadgets and robots. Gadgets are just like Facebook (Facebook reviews) applications, so you can run an app like an online game or a project management tool from within Wave. Robots are smart, automated conversation participants. They can detect keywords and respond, bring in outside information from services like Twitter (Twitter reviews), and more.

Why it’s game-changing: It’s game-changing just as the Facebook platform or the Twitter application boom has been paradigm-shifting for both companies. Imagine only needing to have Google Wave open to manage your Facebook, Twitter, project management, email, and even your video games. You can make Google Wave your all-in-one communication tool.

3. Drag-and-drop file uploads
The feature: In email, you have to search for files, and then attach them before sending. Then you need to open them up when you actually receive the email. Google Wave ignores that entire process by allowing users to drag files from the desktop and dropping them. Anyone can then see the files as they’re being uploaded. Images are shown in an album format, music can be played, and docs can be quickly shared

Why it’s game-changing: Drag-and-drop file uploads makes Google Wave not only a communication platform, but a useful project management system. Companies could use Google Wave as their communication and file-sharing platform. Combined with Wave Extensions, you could build an entire project management platform and time management system better than anything on the market.

4. Wave Embeds
The feature: Wave Embeds is just like what it says - you can embed any wave onto a website. Embeds can be customized and used for a multitude of purposes.

Why it’s game-changing: Embedding is not only an easy way to share conversations with millions of people, but is in fact a way to replace a lot of forms of communication. Instead of a chatroom, you can add a Wave on your company’s website and do customer service through it. Instead of static comments, imagine real-time conversations via Waves. Conversations are easily shared with embeds.

5. Playback
The feature: If you’re added to an email conversation late into the game, it can be a pain to parse all of the back-and-forth within an email conversation. With Wave’s playback feature, you can actually see how the entire conversation developed from the start, making it incredibly easy to catch up on conversations.

Why it’s game-changing: Playback clarifies any conversation and makes it simple to get anyone up-to-speed. Instead of “check your email,” it will become “just playback the wave” and you will have all the information that you need. You could get someone up-to-speed within minutes, rather than hours.

6. Open-source
The feature: Google Wave is not only extendable, but is an open-source project. This means two big things. First, developers can build their own version of Google Wave. Second, Google Wave can be hosted on your own server - just like an Exchange email server.

Why it’s game-changing: You may not think of open-source as a feature, but this may be the most important aspect of Google Wave. Open-source code fosters innovation by allowing developers to improve and correct code. Developers have the freedom to create a Wave server for their company or to create a branded version of Wave.

Open-source is central to Google’s strategy to foster quick adoption. And if people start using or even switching over to Google Wave, then it could very well be the game-changing communication tool that everyone has been waiting for.

Google Wave: A Wave of Mixed Reactions

Here's a list of links I've put together as reference to those who want to know more about Google Wave and how the websphere is reacting. 

I'm not shocked at the mixed reviews, as everyone is entitled to his own opinion. But I'm apalled at the wait-and-see attitude of a lot of people. This is not Microsoft or Apple saying, "Hey, I have a new product that I will sell to the world!" But rather, it's Google saying, "Hey, I have a great idea that will change the world, AND I WANT YOU TO HELP ME MAKE IT HAPPEN."

I still have doubts that Google's intentions are purely altruistic, but I believe this is the future and it's about to begin.

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Links from Google

• Google Wave preview
• Google Blog: Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave.
• Google Wave API

Explanations & Reactions

• AdAge Digital: Google Tries to Rewrite E-mail; It Won't Happen Soon
• ComputerWorld: Google Wave: The fix for social network over-sharing?
• ComputerWorld: Is Google Wave the spork of the Internet?
• TechCrunch: Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web.
• PC Mag: Google Wave: Five Things You Must Know
• Gizmodo: Google Wave Is a Frothy Collaborative Mix of Chat, IM, Twitter and Google Docs in Real-Time
• Mashable: Could Google Wave Redefine Email and Web Communication?
• Engadget: Google Wave unveiled, new live chat medium for browsers, iPhone and Android
• Inside Facebook: What Google Wave Means for Facebook
• ReadWriteWeb: Google Wave: Google Tries to Reinvent Email
• Financial Times: Google Wave: a secret weapon for enterprise?
• CMSWatch: Google Wave: Tsunami or Wipe Out?

Google Wave: The Next Big Thing

I couldn't sleep. Since I heard about it yesterday, I just couldn't get it off my mind.

Google revealed yesterday what I predict will be the next big thing that will change how the world communicates since the invention of e-mail. It's called Google Wave. 

Lars Rasumussen, one of the guys who developed Google Maps, talked about how the idea came about in the Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009. This was Google's answer to a fundamental question they posed: What would email look like if it were invented today?

Mashable offers to explain what Google Wave is in a nutshell: Google Wave is a real-time communication platform. It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client. You can bring a group of friends or business partners together to discuss how your day has been or share files.

In a few years, here's what I predict what will happen: No more e-mails. No more instant messenger. No more keeping of different versions of files in your computer folders. Much less face-to-face meetings. People working on documents or files together online real-time, even if they were miles apart or they were just beside you. Social network and blog discussions will look like everyone typing at the same time on the same computer screen. No more reply button to send a message, just type. Lots and lots of online collaboration happening real-time. It's mind blowing.

And it's here. It's not a concept. Google has a work-in-progress already running. But we need to wait until towards the end of this year to experience it. Not too far off.

Below is a screenshot of the Google Wave interface. Mind you, it runs on the browsers that we use today -- both on computers and mobile phones:

Can't wait to see it in action? Here's the demo from the developers conference: (It might take long to load. Everyone's on it.)

I'll write more about it in the next few days. Still trying to calm myself from too much excitement.